photo by: Bremen Keasey

Lawrence Mayor Mike Dever stands outside City Hall on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024.

Over the span of his career, Mike Dever has found a way to be close to the ideas of city planning.

Dever, who earned a degree from the University of Kansas in environmental studies and geography, has spent his almost 40-year career looking at topics like land use as an environmental and building consultant.

Although his career took him away from Lawrence for a few years, he came back to the city in 1998 and started his own consulting firm, GuideWire Consulting, and still felt his desire to be involved with the city planning process grow. With the skills he gained from his job — reading maps, reviewing documents, working with the state and federal regulators — Dever felt he had the technical skills to understand “the way a city has to operate.” When he first ran for a seat on the Commission in 2006, he won, eventually serving from 2007 to 2015 with two one-year stints as mayor along the way.

Now in his second stint on the commission, Dever is once again in the mayor’s seat. As he looks into the next year for Lawrence, Dever is leaning on his experience in this term as mayor as he hopes to give a steady hand for the city facing a tough budget situation.

“With the skill I acquired the last time and the additional (career) experience, I feel like I could do a good job at the position,” Dever said.

With his background in environmental studies and being an avid biker, one priority of interest to Dever is exploring more multimodal options for pedestrians and bikers.

A big project that Dever noted was finding a way to complete the Lawrence Loop. The Loop will be a network of 22 miles of continuous, paved walking and biking paths around the city. At the moment, 18 miles of the trail are finished, but there are three missing segments that have been planned out. Dever feels that the city needs to ensure there is a tangible plan to complete it that answers how it will happen, how it will be paid for and when it will be finished.

Dever also said he was a big fan of public transit, and expanding access and ease for transit as well as making smaller improvements for multimodal options — such as a plan to add more biking infrastructure along Ninth Street — can create good options for the entire community, not just pedestrians or bikers.

“(Those are ways) we can have a more balanced city,” Dever said.

Another key priority for Dever is ensuring the government is efficient in using its resources, especially as the city has been spending lots of money on upgrades to its systems in the goals to streamline operations.

As an example, Dever said the planning and development services got new computer systems. He hopes that those upgrades, combined with the new soon to be implemented Land Development Code, can help spur building permits that may have been held up in the past. Whether it be homeowners who want to add new siding onto their house or build a new garage or a developer looking to build a new building, Dever hopes the changes can remove a “difficult set of hurdles” in an efficient way that helps the city see improvements.

“Given the fact we want to build more with the resources we have, we need to ensure we’re using them to the best of our ability,” Dever said.

That goal for finding efficiency will be crucial when it comes time to analyze the budget. When the budget was passed on Sept. 3, it kept the city’s mill rate about the same — a big shift from an initial proposal that would have increased the levy by 3.6 mills — by using $1.6 million in general fund balance, a move that commissioners and staff said at the time was not sustainable.

Already, the city has looked to start the process earlier with the addition of the Community Budget Committee. Dever said the commission and city staff will have to look at the deficit and find ways to “bridge the gap” without raising the mill levy.

Home values across the city have been increasing because of higher assessed valuations on property taxes. As the Journal-World reported, home values across the county increased by a median of 7.3% in 2024 based on numbers from the county appraiser’s office. Before the budget was passed, dozens of public commenters spoke out against the potential tax burden of the initial plan during a public hearing in August. Dever said because taxes are going up “regardless of what we do with the mill levy,” the “fundamental approach” he wants to take is to make sure the mill levy is not increased.

“If I can have any impact, I want to approach it (from a standpoint) of how can we be more efficient with the dollars we already have,” Dever said.

With the concerns about the cost of living in Lawrence, Dever said that will mean there will be explorations of how to reduce city services, whether that’s reducing park operating hours, not replacing staff who may retire or a reduction in part-time hours.

Dever thinks that his previous experience will be of help in figuring out how to find ways the city and its great staff can do more with less. One of Dever’s previous terms as mayor came during 2008-2009 when the country was reacting to the 2007 Financial Crisis and subsequent worldwide recession. Despite things looking very down, Dever said the city was able to carry on and implement some great things and found ways to do more with less. With that experience in mind, Dever thinks his perspective can help the city greatly as he serves the people as mayor.

“Knowing we’re in a budget crunch and knowing we’re going to need to look at our future of the next 12 or 24 months differently, perhaps I bring that insight in having done it before,” Dever said.